Epic’s Unreal Engine 5: I got a first look on PS5, and now I’m a believer

I’ve heard the idea before: living film. A game that feels cinematic. This has been the promise of every PlayStation since the beginning of the century.

Take a look at Epic Games’ first look at Unreal Engine 5 PlayStation 5In the end, however, I made myself a believer more than I thought.

The video, which Epic says runs on PlayStation 5 hardware, largely shows how detailed Unreal Engine 5 can be and how it can be illuminated. The entire 8-minute video looks like a pre-rendered cutscene or part of a lush animated film.

The style, somewhere between Tomb Raider and Assassin’s Creed, shows a woman exploring a cave. She finds endless ornate statues and finally flies over a crumbling city that stretches to the horizon. The main features of Unreal Engine 5 are the ability to incorporate digital assets at the film level and render them using Nanite technology, which allows a lot of polygons to be presented at the same time, and a complete lighting system called Lumen, which promises to dynamically illuminate every scene of this detail Polygons on the fly. The 4K version of the video from Epic Games is below.

In part of the video, in a room full of crazy decorated statues, Epic says that each statue model has 33 million triangles drawn and that the room has over 16 billion triangles. Unreal Engine 5 on the PS5 creates about 20 million triangles per frame, resulting in “triangles the size of pixels,” says Epic.

The engine’s spatial audio functions also promise room geometry calculations to produce dynamic sound. Everything seems astonishing, but while the PS5 should be released later this year, Unreal Engine 5 won’t be released until 2021. The preview will be in early 2021, the full version will appear at the end of next year. This video is just a long, early look.

How good could PS5 or Xbox One Series X be?

A sense of detail and scalability … well, you can watch the demo video yourself. However, next generation consoles have made great promises in the past, and demos don’t clearly show what the actual games will do. Unreal Engine 5 will not arrive until 2021, which also means that next generation consoles, including the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox One Series X. will still be waiting for some of their most interesting tools when they are expected to hit the market in late 2020.

Epic promises that Unreal Engine 5 will have similar features on both the PS5 and the next Xbox, but the demo video runs on a PS5, which immediately makes me wonder if Epic thinks PS5 is the best hardware. Epic’s Tim Sweeney won’t be making direct performance comparisons, but while talking about Zoom, he says Unreal Engine 5 takes advantage of next-generation SSD storage speeds. “”[Unreal Engine] Five is now optimizing next-generation storage to accelerate charging by a multiple of current performance. Not just a little bit faster, but also a lot faster, so you can bring in and display that geometry, even though it doesn’t fit everything in memory, and take advantage of next-generation SSD architectures and everything else. Sony is a pioneer in the PlayStation 5 architecture. It has a first-class storage system that is quite far ahead of the PCs. “

It will shrink and Fortnite will get it in 2021

While the PlayStation 5 and Xbox One Series X are clearly the main beneficiaries of the new features of Unreal Engine 5, the engine (obviously) runs on PCs, older consoles, Android and iOS. Fourteen days will switch to UE5 in 2021. “Gen five works on all platforms.” Epens Sweeney confirmed. “It has to be because if Fortnite switches to Unreal Engine 5 at the end of next year, all 9 platforms will continue to be supported.”

On other platforms, it looks like Unreal Engine 5 is just shrinking, although it’s not clear to what extent it will shrink on any platform. “To ensure compatibility with the older generation platforms, we have this next generation content pipeline where you create your assets or import them at the highest quality level – the film quality level – that you run directly on the next generation. Generational consoles, “says Sweeney. “And the engine offers more scalability paths to detach your content so that it can run on all devices, including iOS and Android devices from a few years ago. You can create the same game for all of these systems, but you just get it A different level of graphical fidelity. “

The same downscaling also applies to mobile VR that uses chipsets at the telephone level. “What it means for mobile VR running on a mobile chipset is the same answer … as getting Nanite content up and running on a phone,” confirmed Kim Libreri, Epic’s CTO, in a zoom chat.

Ultra-real VR, immersive attractions

All of these possibilities, and in particular the way in which film assets can be rendered in real time, do not necessarily make me think of games, but of VR.

Epic’s Tim Sweeney agrees. “Of course, all of the technology we’re demonstrating can be run on high-end PC-based VR systems, which means a new generation of graphical fidelity, especially in terms of geometry. I don’t have anything specific to announce for VR here.” , but I think it will create a really interesting march towards photorealism … and if you see devices improve their resolution and other system parameters, it will be very interesting. “

Of course, Sony’s PlayStation 5 will support VR and will most likely receive new PSVR hardware in the future.

Libreri from Epic particularly refers to corporate VR as a big goal, where the additional functions could be even more important. That would also extend to creative studios and could be used in film production. “This resolution of geometry is very important for our corporate customers, whether they are designing a car or an airplane, or making a movie. VR is a very large part of the business … almost everyone who uses Unreal Engine. The design space uses virtual reality to evaluate their spaces and collaborate. “

Is this the cinema gaming crossover?

What Epic appears to flaunt the most in the video is this crazy train distance and the way so many polygons appear at the same time and can be illuminated while running. The most interesting promise from Epic is that cinematic assets can be directly integrated into games and used there. It sounds like the often-promised goal of games that hit movies in a weird interactive mix.

“Absolutely,” says Libreri, pointing out that productions like Disney’s The Mandalorian already work that way. “The way they were caught Virtual LED productions They work an art department out there, pretty much like a game arts department, and they build content before the main photography … I always use the car hunting analogy: what about driving the cars through the terrain like you would do in one ? Video game and then film that? And then you can put film cameras around things. “

“I think next year you will see some great TV shows and films that feel a little bit more like what we do when we play games all the time.”

In the future, my thoughts jumped to fascinating attractions in theme parks, especially Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge and his living video game Falcon Simulator Ride.

“I guarantee our Lucasfilm friends wish they had this technology when they built the Millennium Falcon ride,” said Libreri.